The facilities included in the sample — hand-picked bikeways from Austin, Washington D.C., San Francisco, Chicago and Portland — showed a massive increase in bike traffic, received high marks for improving safety of all road users, and have won over the hearts and minds of people whether they use them or not.

The story goes on to say a quarter of riders say they ride more because of the protected lanes, while protected lanes increase bike traffic an average of 72% in the first year alone. In addition, 96% of people using the lanes felt safer, and 76% of people living nearby support building additional protected lanes, whether they use them or not.

Hopefully authorities will be able to make out the license and press charges for assault. And hopefully they’ll take it as seriously as they say they will.

Thanks to John McBrearty for the heads-up.

………

Local

Mayor Garcetti will announce the city’s first 15 Great Streets on Tuesday, one for each council district. Including North Figueroa, where Councilmember Gil Cedillo has been actively blocking the bike lanes and road diet that would help make it great.

Despite gloom and doom predictions, not one person has died using New York’s Citi Bike bike share program in over 8.75 million journeys.

Bike Snob astutely asks when the hell a bike lane ever stopped a cab driver from parking, and who do you think will police blame when a driverless car hits a cyclist, since they already blame the rider anyway?

Don’t forget to go out and Bike the Vote today. It’s only when bike riders stay home — or don’t vote their interests — that we get the sort of elected leaders who actively stand in the way of safer streets.

Even in places with no facilities and where everyone is edge riding, you will tend to go a lot longer than that without a collision. Collisions are not actually all that common. The sample size is far too small to be useful.

That’s because you have no concept of the scale involved in how often collisions actually happened. That’s a tiny window. Even the most collision prone intersections have them far less often than that.

Thank you for reading my mind and telling me what I am not aware of, especially since it runs counter to what I thought I knew. I truly appreciate you correcting my mistaken impression that I might actually know what the hell I’m talking about.

You see, I was under the evidently mistaken impression that fatal collisions were quite rare — 1 in 6.3 million trips — while the odds of an injury collision are 1 in 77,000. Where did that information come from? Oh, yeah, I wrote it.

On the other hand, non-injury collisions and near collisions are pretty damn common. The fact that neither occurred would seem to say a lot.

Assuming an average trip time of 30 minutes and the odds of an injury collision being 1 in 77000, then you would be looking at an average of 38500 hours between injury collisions or about 267 times as large as 144 hours.

You could shorten the average trip time to 15 minutes and be looking at half that, but it’s still dramatically larger than 144 hours.

Not really. Non-injury collisions are probably unusual. A collision with a car usually involves injury. Minor injury collisions are probably more common and both will likely have a lot not reported.

Near collisions aren’t reported at all, though are probably fairly common. Their definition is somewhat subjective, however.

In science, there is something called a control. There’s no control here. To do an actual scientific study you would have to do a study of the area before the cycletrack is installed as well as after. You would have to consider all times of day and all days of the week and preferably all seasons. Basically, cover a year solid.

This so called study did video for 2 days averaging around 10 hours of video analyzed per intersection. The study is rigged to give the result that PFB and you want.

re: OC pickup truck
If the authorities need help getting the license plate, just ask. There’s a Reddit thread on this issue where people have grabbed stills from the video that clearly show the license is a Virginia plate (I don’t remember the numbers off-hand). Of course, if the idiot has run back home & out of CA, it may make prosecution difficult.

I suffer harassment from people in similar trucks on a regular basis, an even worst it seems that about 1/3 of the cars on the road in my area are similar and similarly loud. I can’t go very far without some shithead blow past me in a jacked up modified truck without muffler. I’m routinely woken up at night when one of my neighbors blows down my street with his mini big rig/monstertruckette/penis extension. I’ve been smoked a few times as well. Apparently these trucks have modified or partially removed emissions equipment that produce smoke when revved or have something installed that produced smoke on demand. I’ve also had water bottles thrown at me when riding and on foot. As well as coins, fast food trash and chicken nuggets. I’ve also been called fag and kike. Not long ago I made the mistake of walking near downtown huntington beach and a group of douchebros in a similar truck stop, yell various obscenities at me, thrown a water bottle and them take off in a cloud of soot. I’ve come to not expect anything but the worst from people in Orange County.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22b27P9Pk9E I experienced something like this the other day and got my recommended lifetime exposure to diesel soot. Some of these shitheads who like to “roll coal” re-route the exhaust out of a smoke stack (like a big rig or power plant) but I suspect that most do not because the ability to cover someone with soot seems to be a part of the appeal. A bit of internet research found numerous references to smoking cyclists, motorcyclists and drivers of cars they dislike (Priuses seemed to be a favorite target). To top it all off they claim that this is “just carbon” and thus is a good for the environment and a fertilizer.

Over the weekend I had another unpleasant experience with a jacked up truck. This time it wasn’t coal it was a horn unlike anything I had ever heard before. At least as loud as a freight locomotive’s horn. Just as the truck passed me in Huntington Beach (no surprise there, that whitetrash shithole is a endless well of automotive thuggery) it blew a horn so loud I nearly fell off my bike. There were no other cars around so I assume it was done merely to fuck with me. Before I had the misfortune of returning to OC I lived in an industrial area in Portland and spent a lot of time waiting on my bike for trains to pass and experienced train horns at close range. Nothing in BNSF’s arsenal was that loud.

The truck video really disturbs me. I train in Muay Thai and teach my son not to resort to violence. I’m scared to think what I would have done to the trash if I got them out of that truck. You endanger my life and it becomes about survival. People are so tough behind the wheel; get them out of the car and they cower. And that is an affluent area of OC. Bet mommy and daddy are still paying for the Dodge and will have no problem bailing them out of jail.